Psychology student wins major award
A Cork student has won one of only six prizes at the prestigious Psychology Society of Ireland All Ireland Student Congress 2024.
Fourth year student at Mary Immaculate College (MIC), Sarah Ryan-Purcell, took home the coveted Psychology Prize at the annual awards at DCU last month.
The Blackrock native was up against some of the brightest psychology students in Ireland. Each student presented their research at the event and were judged on both the quality of the presentation and the content.
Speaking afterwards, Sarah said it was “the cherry on top” to get the award because it was very enjoyable just to get to present her research at the congress.
She added: “I submitted my dissertation on Friday and spoke at the congress on Saturday so I was absolutely over the moon to get the commendation. Being up there and presenting amongst peers was a really nice way to round off the dissertation journey. I was delighted for my classmates too and the adjudicators told us afterwards that they were really impressed with the standards from MIC.”
Sarah’s research project was titled The Troublesome P's and investigated the relationship between perfectionism and academic procrastination, posing the question: ‘Do conscientiousness and achievement goal-orientation play a role?’
“As a sufferer of perfectionism and academic procrastination, I wanted to see the relationship between the two,” said Sarah.
“If we could find out more, we could develop ways of mitigating the negative effects of these, particularly procrastination because it's associated with lower academic achievement, poorer physical health, lower subjective wellbeing – lots of negative outcomes. Nine in 10 third level students procrastinate at some point during their academic degree,” added Sarah.
Her research found that perfectionistic tendencies predict academic procrastination, for example, perfectionists often delay starting tasks because they may be daunted by trying to do it perfectly, or so that they can attribute any failure to the delay rather than personal incompetence, thus protecting their self-esteem.
Sarah noted that perfectionistic tendencies are positively related with mastery approach goal-orientation, i.e. these people are likely to try to master a subject or to build knowledge and skills versus out-performing their peers.
Sarah continued: “A recommendation was that researchers using the causal-steps approach to mediation analysis should identify and measure as many co-variates as possible, such as conscientiousness in my case, and include these in their mediation model so that they can control for their effects and improve the validity of their results.”
Sarah’s thesis supervisor, Dr Niamh Higgins, Assistant Professor in Psychology at MIC, added her congratulations. “This is a wonderful achievement for Sarah. I’m delighted that she has received this well-deserved recognition of her dedication to developing and carrying out this research study to a very high standard.”
Prof. Niamh Stack, Head of the Department of Psychology at MIC, added: “To witness the impressive research skills and genuine desire to contribute to positive change of soon to be psychology graduates from across Ireland during the PSI All Ireland Student Congress was inspiring.
“It was a particular source of pride to see such high calibre representation at the congress from students studying psychology at MIC. Twenty five students from across the BA Arts programme and the B Ed in Education and Psychology programme presented their work at the congress.”